Monthly Archives: December 2023

I always try to tell my fellow Southern Californians when It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is being shown in our area and I always try to point out when my pal Frank Ferrante is Groucho-Marxing around these parts. He'll be at the Laguna Playhouse for five performances from January 4 through January 7. Get more info or get some tickets on this page. And tell 'em Marko sent you.

For those of you who live in Southern California — say, anywhere between Crockett County and Santa Rosita — the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood is showing my fave film, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World on Friday evening, December 22. Tickets are on sale now at this link and they will probably sell out. Every time some local theater shows this movie, tickets sell out quickly and I am at a loss to explain why more houses don't show it more often.

And yes, I've bought my tickets. As you may know, this is a movie that I believe needs to be seen on a big screen with a big audience that appreciates its big cast of big stars. Watching it at home without a big audience and/or a big screen is okay if you've already seen it a few times The Right Way and you're just refreshing your memory of that viewing. And if you do, watch the Criterion Collection DVD or Blu-ray of it which, among its other features, has a really, really long and detailed commentary track by Yours Truly and my pals Mike Schlesinger and Paul Scrabo.

Some of you, by the way, have clued me in that the film can be viewed for free on YouTube. The reason I haven't embedded it here is that I can't think of a worse way to experience this film, especially if you watch it on your phone while waiting for a dental appointment.

And there's another reason why I'm going to the Egyptian that evening. That theater has been completely remodeled and it's supposed to be beautiful and a grand place to watch movies now. We're going to get there early to see the place…and by the way, they're running Mad World as a 70mm film print. That's about half the size of Jimmy Durante's nose.

There are dozens and dozens of articles online about Norman Lear, who has died at the impressive age of 101. They all talk about how many hit TV shows he had and how they changed the landscape of American television…so you don't need me to tell you that. I'll just direct you to this article, this article, this article and while we're at it, this article.

So I'll just add these personal thoughts: There were folks who didn't like how television changed because of Mr. Lear's influence and there were those who didn't like his politics. I think though that if any of them had met him, they would have had a hard time disliking the man. He was genial, charming, funny and not the kind of human to act like he was any better than you were, even though he probably was.

And one of the secrets as to how he could have so many shows on the air at one time, as he did for number of years there, is that he was very good at delegating. I worked on two shows for which he was Executive Producer and never met him on either. The few times I did meet him were strictly social and we spent most of one encounter talking about The Night They Raided Minsky's, a movie he co-produced which I liked and which he liked talking about. I doubt we could have had a conversation about All in the Family or Maude or Sanford & Son or some of the others that he hadn't had with others a thousand times before…but he was not bored with talking about Minsky's.

We also talked a bit about Jerry Lewis. In his early days in television, Lear and his then-partner Ed Simmons wrote for Jerry. An interviewer once asked Lear how it was that he treated the people who worked for him so well and he said something about remembering how Jerry had treated people and just doing the opposite.

Nothing in our conversations was particularly memorable or quotable. You can get the memorable and quotable stuff and a sense of what he accomplished by reading the articles linked above or the many others appearing online at the moment. I just wanted to get on here and tell you how he struck me as a very nice and very wise man.

Earlier this year, a bunch of us got together and created a book called Comics For Ukraine. It's a benefit comic to benefit folks in Ukraine whose lives have been devastated by the ongoing war there and many of the stories in this book address their plight, directly or indirectly. My partner Sergio Aragonés and I contributed a new tale of Groo the Wanderer and there are stories by others whose names appear below.

Many of you already procured copies by contributing to the crowd-funding campaign. Now, those of you who didn't get in on that have a chance to buy copies and, of course, help those over there in dire need of assistance. There are NINE (9) different editions of this book, all with the same interiors, and they're all available for immediate purchase at the Zoop HQ Platform. Here are the nine versions…

1. Hardcover with Alex Ross cover — $60
2. Hardcover with Alex Ross cover signed by Ross — $100
3. Hardcover with Alex Ross cover signed by 13 creators (Anderson, Aragonés, Busiek, Chaykin, Evanier, Layman, Sakai, Sharp, Louise Simonson, Walter Simonson, Tucci, Waid, Wagner) — $175
4. Softcover with Arthur Adams cover — $40
5. Softcover with Arthur Adams cover, signed by Adams — $60
6. Softcover with Dave Johnson cover — $40
7. Softcover with Dave Johnson cover, signed by Johnson — $60
8. Softcover with Bill Sienkiewicz cover — $40
9. Softcover with Bill Sienkiewicz cover, signed by Sienkiewicz — $60

There are 15 brand new stories, each created for this book featuring well-known creations like Howard Chaykin's American Flagg, Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson's Astro City, John Layman and Rob Guillory's Chew, Matt Wagner's Grendel, Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier's Groo the Wanderer, Billy Tucci on The Rocketeer, Jill Thompson's Scary Godmother, Walter Simonson's Star Slammers and, Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo.

There are also original creations by Colleen Doran, Larry Hancock & Michael Cherkis, Gabe Rodriguez & Mark Waid, Liam Sharp, Emil Ferris, Louise Simonson & June Brigman, as well as single pages by pin-ups by Greg Hildebrandt, Joe Jusko, Joseph Michael Linsner, and political cartoons by Pia Guerra and Peter Kuper. The book was tirelessly and magnificently assembled by its editor, Scott Dunbier, and the money is being prudently distributed by the folks at my favorite charity, Operation USA.

Here's your chance to get a superb book for yourself and help some people in need of help. And since I know you want to immediately order a book, here's that link again. I am proud to be a part of it and you can be, too.

I know you probably don't come to this blog seeking advice on what to eat…and the truth is that I don't care what you eat as long as it's not another human being or cole slaw.  But I recently found a great breakfast item that I love and if you don't want this kind of recommendation from me, you don't have to read any farther.  If you do, here it is…

It's Jones brand Chicken Sausage and if you try them, read the instructions. They come frozen and they're delicious, especially once you learn to heat them properly, which will probably involve turning the Power Settings down on your microwave oven. They're real easy to overcook and you'll find that after you heat them, they should be consumed immediately. If you leave them around for a few minutes, the taste becomes increasingly less special.

Costco, when they have them, sells them in my area for $15.29 for a bag of approximately 45 sausages. This works out to about 34¢ per sausage. The Costcos in my area have been out of them lately so I've turned to local markets where I find them in boxes of ten for $3.50 which is 35¢ per sausage. The Costco version is organic and what the local markets have is "all-natural" without nitrites, nitrates or preservatives and they're made from chickens raised without added hormones. That's close enough to organic for me.

Jones also makes a turkey version but I tried those and they're good but not as good as the chicken. And if you are into cannibalism and/or cole slaw, just know that the chicken ones probably taste better than anyone you're likely to consume, and everything tastes better than cole slaw.

I just received a royalty check from Disney Worldwide Services, Inc. It was for something I wrote many years ago for Marvel which they recently reprinted and I have no idea what it is. I could figure it out from the invoice they e-mailed me and perhaps I will just for my own accounting purposes.  But unlike when DC reprints something I wrote for them, Disney/Marvel doesn't send me a copy of the new book. In this case, I might lose money on the deal if I went out and bought a copy.

So don't be even a smidgen impressed that I got this check. It did though give me two immediate memories from half a century ago. One came the first time I wrote a comic book story for Disney. This was for the Disney Studios, not for Western Publishing Company, which published the American Disney comics in their Gold Key line. I went to work for Western later.

Western Publishing was not publishing a vast amount of Disney comic books in the early seventies. The company was on the downside then, having great trouble getting their books distributed to newsstands. The marketplace for comics was shrinking and one of the execs there told me — and I'm still not sure how much I should believe this — that DC and Marvel were getting relentless in squeezing competitors off the racks by all possible means. In fact, "relentless" was the word he used.

A year or two later, Western gave up even trying to get distribution in several states, including New York. Their best bet, they thought, was selling their comics in bagged lots to toy and department stores via the same channels they sold their Whitman line of activity books (coloring books, puzzle books, etc.). This method worked for a little while. In fact, they even sold some of their competitors' products that way. Eventually though, it stopped being practical and Western got the hell out of the comic book business.

In 1969, Western wasn't publishing a lot of Disney comics and some of them were all or partially reprints. Western did commission new stories and when they did, the Disney organization could sell photostats of those stories to foreign Disney publishers to reprint overseas. For Disney, the cash that came in from that was almost pure profit since Western had paid for the writing, drawing and lettering. Furthermore, the demand for Disney comics in other countries was so great that a division on the Disney lot began commissioning comic book stories just to sell to the overseas publishers.

I began submitting scripts to them and I think my first sale was a Three Little Pigs story. Western wasn't doing any Three Little Pigs comics at the time. One day, I received a check from Disney for it — a very handsome (in design, not amount) check with a full-color picture of Mickey Mouse on it.

I showed it to my parents…and I could have shown my father a Nobel Peace Prize or a Pulitzer I'd won and he couldn't have been any prouder than he was of his son at that moment. Come to think of it: An hour later, he walked into my room and said, "Mark, could I see that check one more time?" He had me promise that before I deposited it, I'd make a Xerox of it — and he didn't say this part but I think he was thinking, "…just in case no one ever pays you for your writing again."

The next day, I walked up to the branch of California Federal Savings where I had my savings account. I stopped off at a drugstore where you could make copies for a dime each and made two copies — just in case no one ever paid me for my writing again — and then it was on to CalFed, which at the time seemed like the most solid, wealthy financial institution in the state. Which it was until 1994 when it was shut down by federal regulators.

I endorsed the check, filled out a deposit slip, took them to a teller and she began staring at that check. And staring. And staring. And it took me a minute or two to figure out what the problem was…

She thought it was a toy check.

It had Mickey Mouse on it and a 17-year-old kid had brought it in. She was wondering if maybe it was part of a toy set called something like The Mickey Mouse Bank that came with toy money, toy deposit slips, toy free calendars and toy notices of foreclosure. I was getting $20 in cash back from my deposit and for a second there, I thought she was going to try to give it to me in bills with Jiminy Cricket on them.

Instead, she took the check over to some superior who told her it was real. It dawned on me later that she was just new on the job and had simply never seen a Disney check before. They must have had a lot of them there…a hunch which was confirmed for me a few months later when I went in to make another deposit and found myself waiting in line behind Sebastian Cabot. Mr. Cabot was, among his other job, the narrator of the Winnie the Pooh cartoons for Disney. He lived two blocks from that outlet of California Federal Savings and might have deposited a lot of Disney checks there.

So that was one of the two memories that today's check from Disney resurrected. The other was a few years after that and for this memory, I want you to get a certain tone of voice in your head. Imagine for a moment that you are a very small child and you are being lectured by an older person in a position of power at a big company.

You have just asked an innocent question and the older person is not only telling you that what you ask is impossible and will never-in-a-million-years happen, he is trying to make you feel like you know less-than-zero about what you're talking about. And he even says in these very words, "If you understood anything about this industry, you'd know that it would cease to exist if we ever did what you are asking!"

Okay, so you've now got that tone of voice and that italicized quote in your brain. And my Disney check today for something I wrote years ago for Marvel reminded me of that tone and that quote from a senior executive at one of the big two comic book companies. He was responding to my question about whether they might consider paying reuse fees to their writers and artists when their work was reprinted.

I have a strange affinity for cooking videos…and what's strange about that is that I would never consider even attempting almost anything I see anyone make online. This even applies to things that look like I'd enjoy eating them. The Chefs of YouTube always convince me that it's too much trouble and/or that it requires experience which I simply don't have. I'll see someone prepare Beef Stroganoff and I'll think, "Wow, that's how you make Beef Stroganoff? I'm glad I watched this because now I know to never try preparing Beef Stroganoff!"

And sometimes, I just find the videos amusing. Today, I watched a video of Bob Hope delivering a monologue and another one of a gent named Sonny Hurrell making a pasta dish I've seen in the thumbnails of several cooking videos. It involves wrapping ground beef around a handful of uncooked spaghetti. I shall now embed the video that of the two, I found funnier…

Top 10 Show Tunes Performances on The Ed Sullivan Show (in someone's opinion)…

Those of us waiting for the Arclight Cinerama Dome Theater in Hollywood to reopen will be waiting longer than we expected…

We're about two weeks from the 23rd anniversary of this blog and I'm amazed to find that I have stories I still haven't told here. Here's one of them and before I start it, I'd like to thank Follower-Of-This-Blog Michael Kilgore for digging up the news clipping that acts as the punch line to this story. Now then…

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Kuda Bux (born Khudah Bukhsh in 1905) was one of the first celebrity magicians and even briefly starred in his own TV show in 1950. He did many kinds of amazing feats but was famous for two. One was walking across hot coals while barefoot, which he did all across the country before astonished spectators and newsreel cameras.

The other was the one that caused him to be billed as "The Man With X-Ray Eyes." He would be blindfolded…and not just with the simple kind. He would invite people to cover his eyes and often his whole head with coins, bandages, dough, cloths, etc. — you'll see in the video below how extensive this could be — and then he'd drive a car or read a book or do something else that proved he could somehow see. It was a magic trick but such a good one that a lot of people were convinced something mystical was happening there.

One of the places he performed his feats was on a TV show called You Asked For It which aired from 1950 until 1959, returning later in various versions. The premise of the show was simple: People would write in and suggest things they'd like to see on the show — amazing stunts, celebrity reunions, acts they'd heard about and so forth. They had Kuda Bux on many times and the clip below is from one of those times. But first, this story…

The exclusive private club in Hollywood called The Magic Castle proved they weren't that exclusive by admitting me into membership in 1980. It was and still is a great place to go, eat fine food and see some of the world's greatest magicians perform. In fact, I was there last Sunday evening with friends and among the performers we saw were Javi Benitez (proudly displaying his Penn & Teller: Fool Us trophy) and Larry Wilmore — yes, the guy from The Daily Show. But let me tell you about another evening at the Castle.

The date, I believe, was Wednesday, February 4, 1981. I was there with my friend Shary Flenniken, who most of you know from National Lampoon and her strip, "Trots n' Bonnie." Very fine cartoonist. We'd dined and seen some great magic and were just about to depart when a magician I knew saw us heading for the exit and said, "You're not leaving, are you?" We said we were both pretty exhausted. He said, "You're going to miss Kuda Bux?"

I knew who Kuda Bux was. Shary didn't but I did and I knew that he had retired, in part because The Man With X-Ray Eyes was, of all possible ironies in this world, almost blind due to Glaucoma. He had not performed anywhere for a while but he was doing a special one-time performance in the Parlor of Prestidigitation, which is one of the showrooms in the Magic Castle.

It had not been advertised. He'd agreed to do it because a lot of magician members wanted to see him and most of the seats, we were told, had been filled via word-o'-mouth among those members. It was starting in fifteen minutes.

Shary was dead-tired but she was nice enough to indulge me. We made a dash for the Parlor and managed to get the last two open seats. I recognized almost everyone else in the room as a working magician and some of them were pretty danged famous.

Kuda Bux started his show with a new magic trick he'd invented in retirement. He said it was the first time he'd performed it before an audience and probably the last. He had an empty metal frame on a stand. He daubed rubber cement all around the rim, then displayed a piece of brown paper, the kind used to make grocery bags.

He affixed the paper to the frame so the frame was covered with the paper and there was obviously nothing behind it. Then he brought out a faucet, stuck it through the brown paper, turned it on and began filling glasses of wine which he passed out to folks in the front row.

The audience applauded mightily and a few of them — these were mostly very experienced magicians, remember — looked like they weren't sure how he'd done that. Seeing that look is one of the joys sometimes of going to the Magic Castle: Magicians fooling not only the audiences but each other.

Then Kuda Bux did the x-ray eyes trick. The set-up — putting coins and dough over his eyes, then wrapping his head with many bandages — was pretty much the same as in this video, which I've just decided I should embed right here so you can watch it before I finish this story. Here it is from an old episode of You Asked For It…

What Kuda Bux did in the Parlor that night was the same trick except there were no guns, no glasses of acid, no cigarette-lighting. They wrapped his head and he invited members of the audience to come up, write on a blackboard and then he'd replicate what they wrote. That was mystifying enough to evoke more of those uncertain looks from seasoned magicians.

He closed with a brief Q-and-A with the audience with a lot of them telling him how privileged they felt to see him perform. Pointedly, no one asked him anything about how he'd done either trick but I'd bet cash-money that some of them were soon at the Magic Castle Library, reading up on how he'd done the x-ray eyes feat. Most of the great magic tricks of the world are explained in that collection.

Now, here's where the story gets a little chilling…

At the time, I was a writer on the TV show, That's Incredible!, which was kind of a successor-in-interest to You Asked For It. After Kuda Bux concluded his presentation, everyone present gathered around to shake his hand and fawn. I made my way to him and asked if he'd like to do his act on our show.

I didn't really have the authority to make that offer but I knew our producers would go for it. He said he'd love to do it and he gave me his contact info. He seemed pretty happy as did the friends around him who overheard our discussion. The next day, I told the folks at the show about him and everyone who had to approve the booking approved the booking.

I gave his contact info to our Talent Coordinator who attempted to reach him to arrange his appearance on the next episode we taped. She was unable to reach him but she kept trying and trying — and finally, a week or so later, there was an item in the trade paper Variety about him. It was wrong about him appearing frequently at the Castle in recent years but sadly right as to why we hadn't been able to reach him…

A company called Brightline has been saying for some time now they would "break ground in the second half of 2023" on a high-speed rail project that will connect Southern California with Las Vegas. Today, we enter the last twelfth of 2023 and I haven't heard or read anything to indicate that this has started. Assuming it happens as announced…

Brightline West will be America's first true high-speed passenger rail system. The modern, eco-friendly system will redefine train travel in America and connect two of our most iconic destinations: Las Vegas and Southern California. This 218-mile passenger rail service will be operated by Brightline West from Las Vegas to Rancho Cucamonga, California, with 96% of its alignment within the median of the I-15 highway.

Sounds exciting, right? I hope they can pull it off but…well, even if my now-low enthusiasm for Vegas were to regenerate, I don't think I'd use it. For one thing, to get to the train station they intend to build in Rancho Cucamonga would not be easy. Rancho Cucamonga is around 44 miles from me. I just consulted Waze and it says that if I were to leave right now for the Rancho Cucamonga station, it would take 1 hour and 13 minutes in "typical traffic."

Since they probably won't be running a lot of trains to and from Vegas, at least at first, it would probably be a matter of arriving on time for my train or waiting many hours for the next one. "Typical traffic" in my city can get atypical without notice so I'd have to build a lot of pad into that drive to Rancho Cucamonga along with time to park. So add an hour to that 1:13. The Brightline train (they say) will travel at speeds up to 186+ miles per hour, delivering me to a station on the Las Vegas Strip in two hours and ten minutes.

So total time from my garage to the Las Vegas strip would be around four and a half hours…or about the time that Waze tells me if would take me to drive right now from my house to Caesars Palace. I just looked that up too.

I also tried figuring it if I drove or took an Uber to Union Station downtown to take a Metrolink train to Rancho Cucamonga. Union Station is nine miles and again, you have to allow pad time…and if I drove there, parking time as well. It works out to even longer.

Meanwhile, in addition to driving, there's another way I could get to Vegas and it's available to me right now: Drive or take an Uber the 45 minutes to LAX Airport. Add in an hour pad for traffic on the way or in the TSA line plus maybe parking, then take a nonstop Southwest Airlines flight (60-75 minutes) to the airport in Vegas. Figure a fifteen minute cab ride to the Strip…and that's probably well under four hours.

Going Brightline to Vegas may be way faster for people who live near Rancho Cucamonga but for me, it's not gonna be faster and given how many zillions they're spending to build this super-charged choo-choo business, I doubt it will be cheaper. If you book a flight in advance, you can find $44 fees on Southwest so when they talk about Brightline serving Southern California and a projected "11 million one-way passengers annually," I dunno. Most of Southern California lives farther from Rancho Cucamonga than I do.

Don't get me wrong: I love the idea. On the project's website, they talk about all the jobs it would create and all the environmental advantages and that all sounds peachy. And I'd love to see the day when a high-speed train would whisk me from my neighborhood to Las Vegas or even to Rancho Cucamonga for the transfer but I just don't see that happening. Here's hoping I'm wrong.